Colin Hill
CEO, President, Chairman, and Co-Founder
Colin Hill brings years of hands-on scientific experience to his role, with expertise in the areas of computational physics and systems biology.
Colin is a frequent speaker at international scientific and industry conferences and has appeared in numerous publications and television segments including The Wall Street Journal, CNBC Morning Call, Nature, Forbes, Wired, and The Economist. He serves as Chairman of GNS Healthcare’s parent company Via Science, a leading big data analytics company focused on business intelligence, finance, and economic forecasting. He also serves on the board of directors of AesRx, a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of a new treatment for sickle cell disease, on the advisory board of the Boston Medical Center’s philanthropic trust, and as the chair of the industrial advisory board of EBICS.
Colin is the author of the “Healthcare 2020” blog on Forbes.com. In 2004, Colin was named to MIT Technology Review’s TR35 list of the top innovators in the world under the age of 35. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in physics and earned master’s degrees in physics from McGill University and Cornell University.
David Burke, MBA
Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer
David Burke contributes to the planning and execution of new corporate initiatives and coordinates operational, financial, and administrative matters for GNS Healthcare.
David has extensive experience in the formation, capitalization, management, and disposition of high growth, entrepreneurial businesses in healthcare analytics, professional services, product development, internet, and other industries. Prior to joining GNS Healthcare, David served as CFO of healthcare analytics leader QualityMetric Incorporated (QM), where he helped the company frame strategy and enhance execution to facilitate its rapid growth and successful acquisition by Ingenix, a $1.8B subsidiary of United Health Group (NYSE: UNH). Prior to QM, David served as Director of Corporate Development of Item New Product Development, an integrated design, engineering, and contract supply company. During David’s tenure the firm achieved breakout growth while evolving from a general industry practice into a holding company with market-specialized subsidiaries, including the successful launch of medical device subsidiary, Ximedica. Among other experience, David also has a background in senior housing, including the development of large scale independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, and cognitive care facilities.
David holds a BA from Harvard College and an MBA from Columbia Graduate School of Business.
Iya Khalil, PhD
Executive Vice President and Co-Founder
Iya Khalil oversees the application of the company’s simulation technology to critical challenges in the healthcare industry.
A frequent speaker at industry events and conferences, she has extensive experience in reverse engineering and forward simulations of large-scale genetic and biochemical networks. Iya is an inventor on a number of pending patents and has published multiple articles on in silico technologies applied to drug discovery and development. Prior to joining GNS Healthcare, she worked at Cornell University, University of Washington, and Abbott Labs. Iya holds a B.S. in physics from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University.
Carol McCall, FSA, MAAA
Chief Strategy Officer
Carol McCall is responsible for guiding the development of GNS Healthcare’s strategies and aligning them with key initiatives, investments and offerings.
Carol is a health actuary with a background in innovation, predictive analytics and health services design. Her specialties are creating novel computational approaches that leverage ‘big data’ in healthcare and designing services and business models that expand on the traditional notions of health, care, community and sustainability. Most recently, Carol served as Chief Innovation Officer at Tenzing Health, a subsidiary of Vanguard Health Systems, where she merged creative analytic approaches with innovations in health services that extended the dimensions of care, improved people’s health, and dramatically reduced their healthcare costs.
Prior to joining Tenzing, Carol led the R&D efforts in Humana’s Innovation Center where she pioneered using sophisticated analytic techniques to build a portfolio of prediction, knowledge discovery and simulation models. She also launched Humana’s innovations in personalized medicine and led Humana’s Health Services Research Center (HSRC), emphasizing research in population health, health outcomes, health economics, pharmacovigilance, and the psychology of health behavior change. Carol also helped launch Green Ribbon Health, LLC a Florida-based company creating innovations in health support services for seniors in Tampa, and later served on their Board of Directors.
Carol also served as Humana’s Chief Information Officer and as VP of Pharmacy Management. Outside of Humana, she served as EVP of Managed Care Business Development for Allscripts Healthcare Solutions and as an actuarial consultant for Milliman. Carol served as a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), a member of the HSRC’s governing board and as advisor to the HRP Scientific Program Board.
Hans (Johann) Winkler, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer
Hans Winkler is responsible for developing GNS Healthcare’s offerings to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry as well as academia.
Hans is an expert in new medicine discovery and development, with 13 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Prior to joining GNS, he was senior director at Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson where, among other responsibilities, he was leading biomarker research programs.
Hans joined Janssen in Beerse in 2003 as head of Functional Genomics, combining genomic technologies and bioinformatics. Before that he was Director and Global Program Manager for Target Validation Technologies at AstraZeneca, plc in Manchester, UK, with responsibility for target validation technology assessment and acquisition across all disease areas globally. Hans was born in Austria where he received primary education followed by a Master’s Program (Molecular Biology) in Houston, TX, and a PhD program (Biochemistry) in Vienna, Austria.
Hans is co-author of some forty original, peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and inventor on two patents.
Thomas Neyarapally, JD, MBA
Executive Vice President, Corporate Development
Tom Neyarapally leads GNS Healthcare’s business and corporate development activities and spearheads and implements the strategic vision for the expansion, protection and monetization of the company’s intellectual property.
Before joining GNS Healthcare, Tom served as an associate in the New York office of the law firm Frommer, Lawrence & Haug LLP, where he focused on transactional, product development, and litigation matters in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Tom previously was an associate in the corporate department at Chadbourne & Parke, LLP, and held the position of analyst at Arthur D. Little. Tom holds a J.D. and an M.B.A. from Cornell University and is a registered patent attorney. While attending Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, he served as a partner with BR Ventures, the Johnson School’s student-run venture capital firm. Tom graduated from the University of Connecticut as an Honors Scholar with a B.S. in chemical engineering.
Bruce Church, PhD
Chief Mathematics Officer
Bruce Church leads the design and implementation of the company’s proprietary REFS™ network inference and forward simulation engine.
An expert in computational biophysics and supercomputing, Bruce spent the previous decade developing global optimization methods for computational protein folding, the results of which have been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Bruce has been awarded and served as the principal investigator on several major grants, including a $2.5 million award from the Department of Energy. Bruce received a B.S. in Applied and Engineering Physics and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Paul McDonagh, PhD
Vice President, Science and Technology
Paul McDonagh directs and oversees discovery efforts at GNS Healthcare. He uses supercomputing to apply computational techniques to discover new insights and networks from raw, high-dimensional biological data.
Before joining GNS Healthcare, Paul led the computational team in the Medical Sciences organization at Amgen in Seattle, where he focused on the translation of high-throughput measurements to clinical trials. He was previously at Rosetta Inpharmatics/Merck, designing and analyzing microarray experiments. While there, he and the Rosetta team published the first genomic tiling experiments to find new genes in the Genome edition of Nature. Paul completed his post-doctoral work at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and the University of Washington sequencing pathogen genomes. He graduated from the University of Leicester with a Ph.D. in protein structure modeling and NMR.
W. Michael Korn, MD
Special Advisor, Oncology
Michael Korn guides GNS Healthcare’s efforts in both cancer drug development and oncology patient and payer solutions.
Dr. Korn is a professor at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (HDFCCC) in San Francisco and an expert in the management of gastrointestinal cancers. He performs diagnostic and therapeutic endoscopies as well as administers medical treatments, such as chemotherapy. In addition to caring for patients, he is the lead investigator of clinical trials exploring new gastrointestinal cancer treatments and also leads an independent laboratory program in basic and translational research at the UCSF Cancer Center centered on the rational development of targeted combination therapies for cancer. Dr. Korn is co-director of the Center of Molecular Oncology at the HDFCCC. His laboratory is involved in research to develop combination therapies for gastrointestinal and breast cancer based on the analysis of signal-transduction pathways. Dr. Korn is also the co-founder of Targeted Therapeutics Consulting, Inc in 2004, which produces the curated oncology database Curabase.
A native of Germany, Dr. Korn earned a medical degree at the University of Marburg and the University of Dusseldorf in Germany. He completed a medical internship at the University of Bern in Switzerland and concluded training at Ev. Krankenhaus Dinslaken in Germany and the University of Essen’s West German Cancer Center. Dr. Korn completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Frank McCormick at UCSF and with Dr. Reinhard Becher at the West German Cancer Center, Essen, Germany, where he also completed his training in hemato-oncology and gastroenterology. Dr. Korn serves on the NCCN Guidelines Panel for esophageal and gastric cancer.